


dreambubbles.

by niiiiix



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Dave POV, Doomed Timeline(s) (Homestuck), Doomed Timelines, Dreambubbles, Hurt and comfort, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER: - Freeform, M/M, Meteor, Meteorstuck, Second POV, THERE'S A LOT TO UNPACK HERE!, and likely last, but they're still notable enough to tag, hmm, i hate it idk why i did it, it really isn't that graphic i promise, its not too major so idk why i put the graphic tag, kiss, mentions of death and blood, mentions of drowning?, meteorfic, tags will be updated if i can think of more to add, this is the first, time i write in second pov, uhh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27406603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niiiiix/pseuds/niiiiix
Summary: Dave finds himself confessing to another timeline's version of Karkat, and it only causes problems.
Relationships: Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 6
Kudos: 78





	dreambubbles.

**Author's Note:**

> IM SORRY I HAVENT UPDATED MY ONGOING FIC IN SO LONG, I PROMISE I WILL, I JSUT NEED TO THINK OF FILLER SCENES HFJKDHFSJ

You fucking hate Vriska’s voice.

You never really speak to her, so the only time you hear her voice is when she’s on a loudspeaker that somehow manages to project throughout the whole meteor announcing that there is “A HUGE DREAMBUBBLE INCOMING, BITCHES!” You sigh and lock the door to your room (or respiteblock, as Karkat had insisted upon calling it) and close up the vents. It gets ridiculously cold in your room when they’re on, and you hate your room cold. Especially when waking up from a dream bubble; that transition was hard enough on its own. 

The dream bubbles are rough, but the part you hate the most is getting into them. You have to sit and wait on your bed for who even knows how long until it passes through the ship, and then through you. You aren’t quite sure how to describe the feeling, and the best way you could think to would be “as if numbness was a broken dam/ feelin’ empty like a hologram”. You’d tried to write several raps about time on the meteor, but they never came out right. Like the line above. Something sat wrong about it, and you don’t know how to fix it.

You lay down, mulling over another song you’d started at another time. This one was about the inhabitants of the meteor, and you could never quite find the right words for Karkat. Rose and Kanaya were easy, you just played around with the fact that Rose was a Seer of Light and Kanaya was a light-up vampire. Those lines were fun. Vriska and Terezi’s were a bit harder because you don’t know Vriska that well, and you had some weird history with Terezi, but you got by pretty quickly. You wrote some ominous lines about Gamzee, or the lack thereof, and was almost done. That got you to where you are now, scanning your head for the right way to describe the troll.

Because Karkat was everything. It wasn’t that there was no other way to put that- it’s that there were too many. How would you even start? With the way that he would do anything for his friends in the sake of ‘leadership’, just because he wanted to do everything in his power to make sure that they were safe? Or how when you break down the facade, you get to see who he really is. Scared. And, yeah, it’s not like that’s ideal or anything, but that’ll go away with time. You’ll do your best, anyway. Because you know how that feels. Keeping up a strong facade when you’re really just scared and confused inside. Fuck. How are you supposed to say all this shit to him when you can’t even fully say it to yourself? You can’t put it together enough to even rhyme it, and that’s probably one of your top three talents, alongside two other rap-centered skills.

You pull a pillow over your head and ignore the slight stabbing feeling you get when the bridge of your shades pushes into your nose. You feel a pull at the bottom of your stomach, and groan. The dream bubble should be passing through your room in a matter of minutes. You take a deep breath and flop over so your face is on your bare mattress. 

And you feel everything inside of you get sucked into the dream bubble. You aren’t quite sure about the physics of the thing, but you can confidently say that every time this happens, you feel like you want to puke but you just don’t have the organs for the job. It always hits your head last, and because you are, at your core, still technically just a really sauced up monkey, your brain goes into panic mode. Thinking stupid things like “ _ where are my legs _ ” and “ _ where did my guts go _ ”. Stupid shit you technically already know the answer to, but don’t end up remembering until half a second after the thought finishes.

After you enter the dream bubble, you feel awful. Entering always feels like you’ve been reconstructed out of Play-Doh in the wrong order. Droopy, heavy, and sticky. You pick yourself up off your bed and open your eyes. 

Oh. You’re just in your room this time. 

You’ve been to some weird places, forests and oceans. Sometimes it’s just places you think about often, though. You can’t count the number of times you’ve ended up in John’s house, whether in his room or the tire swing he talks about all the time outside in his front yard. You’ve never laid down before a dream bubble with the intent of seeing your best bro’s empty house, but that’s just what they do sometimes. Read your subconscious. Or maybe your main consciousness. You’re not too sure. You used to think about John a lot. 

You still miss him. Really, you do, but it’s easy to miss someone who isn’t there, and John was just about as far as he could be from you for another couple years. Not to mention you felt sick, sad, lonely, and a little bit like a perv in his room without him. So you did your best to stop thinking about him, and the dream bubbles just don’t really know where to take you anymore.

So you have to be in some kind of doomed timeline. With dead Daves and dead Roses and dead Terezis. Dead Vriskas and- You’d say that something catches in your throat, but you’re not even talking, so you’re not sure what to make of it- Dead Karkats. It wasn’t that all the bodies were lined up right outside your door or anything, you just… Figured. That’s how dream bubbles work, right? They’re only there because the people already died? Fuck, you don’t know.

What you do know is that everything feels like you’re underwater. When you tug on the handle of your door, it feels like it takes you longer to move your hand to the knob, but the door itself is lighter. Like everything is underwater. You didn’t actually know how to swim up until about a few months ago, when you realized that sitting next to a large body of water was much more boring than learning how to be in one. You had to ask Rose for advice, because of course she knows how to swim, and soon enough you figured it out. You started playing around with your time powers underwater, and you even managed to give yourself an almost infinite amount of air as long as you’d previously made bubbles. There was one time, though, where you inhaled a whole lungful of water mistakenly, and you’d never felt so scared.

It burned your throat and your eyes widened, everything becoming blurry and dark. You instinctively tried coughing up the water, and then you only took in more after that. The most notable feeling was a calmness that settled in the pit of your stomach, almost welcoming you to sink further down. That was probably the scariest dreambubble you’ve had, and it wasn’t even related to your life at all. 

That’s almost exactly how you feel once you open your door. 

You’d already deducted that since you were in a doomed timeline, that means that everyone was killed by something or other, but you guess you just weren’t expecting to see proof of that immediately. The door gets stopped before you can even open it halfway by something soft and something short and something dead.

Something like Karkat. The air leaves your lungs all in one go. He’s curled up, arms around his waist with his knees in the way, and there’s a bright puddle of a candy red stemming from his center and a small line running off his forehead down through his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed, thank gog, you don’t know what you would have done if they were just open and looking at the foot of your door.

God, wait, he’s at the foot of your door. Was he trying to get in? Was he trying to get to you? Where were you? You bend down next to his body and don’t know what to do with your hands. You settle for your knees and try and force yourself to close your eyes. You’re seeing too much, you’re feeling too much. Again, you don’t know how to word it and you aren’t sure if you could. It’s an overwhelming emptiness, one that filled up your whole being and took up too much room for anything else to be felt or understood. Your stomach does turns, flattening all your other organs and pushing the breath out of your lungs the very second it comes back in. Your shoulders shake and you don’t feel yourself fall down next to him. Tears fall down your face awkwardly, dripping down the bridge of your nose and into your other eye. It was hard to see, but you weren’t sure you wanted to. Because there he is, and he’s in front of you, and he’s dead.

_ except he isnt, really _ , you try and remind yourself. The Karkat in your timeline is fine. He’ll be fine, and he’ll stay fine. You decide on it right this moment, with your comprehension gone and your heart heaving. You won’t let Karkat die. He deserves so much more than this.

“Dave?”

You get up so fast, you feel like you’re falling up. You nearly hit your head on the wall. You swivel your head around, wiping your cheeks with your hands. “Karkat?” You say, because it’s the only word you can even vocalize right now. Karkat, Karkat, Karkat. Over and over until you land on a faint gray smudge down the hall.

You take off your shades without hesitation. The hallways are too dark to bother with them right now. And you’re sure it’s him, but something seems… off. You push yourself off the floor and start moving towards him. You aren’t sure if you’re running or maybe flying, but you know that he’s too far to stomach walking. Your feet land back on the ground about a foot from him, and your eyes slowly, shakily look up. “Woah, fuck, your eyes are red.” Karkat says quietly, sounding a bit scared.

“I never showed you them?” Your voice is much louder than you intend, and you guess it’s off of nerves.

Karkat shook his head quickly, leaning in a bit more. And somehow, you only just notice that his eyes are fully white. It’s off-putting, once you see it, and then you start seeing more. How he looks paler than usual, making the bags under his eyes much more dramatic, and how the red spot on his forehead earlier seemed mostly healed over, a messy semicircle of a scar covering where your favorite freckle on his face was. And the worst part was that he was transparent in the only way that didn’t matter. This Karkat had a transparency that all the other ghosts (where were they?) had in common, but he wasn’t your Karkat, and you are not all the other ghosts. If you reached out to touch your Karkat, he’d lean right in without even knowing and it’d warm you right up and make you feel like a tree lit up from a lightning bolt. But if you reached your hand out to this Karkat, your hand would pass through and grasp desperately at the memory of the Karkat you thought you had.

You take a step back. “I thought that would have been universal, I guess.”

Karkat scowls like you’re stupid. “Nothing’s ever universal. That’s the point.”

You smile like it, too. “Oh, really? Then how come my-”

Karkat reaches forward to cover your mouth on instinct. It sends a chill down your neck and you feel a tingling on your lips. You aren’t sure if it’s the ghostiness or the fact that it was Karkat. You feel a coldness pass through your throat, like you were overheated and you drank cold water. An alien feeling. “Shut up! Shut up. I didn’t have time for this when I was alive, and I definitely don’t have time for it now.”

“Dude, all you have is time. That’s the whole point.” You gesture around with the full length of your arms as though there were something on the walls that would prove your point. And while that isn’t technically wrong, it’s only so in the most depressing possible way. You sarcastically thank all the colorful blood on the walls in your head.

Karkat’s expression deepens, and he falsely slides down the wall until he’s sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees. It looks just like his cadaver behind you, and you wonder why that’s his default pose. Comfort? Pain? 

You follow suit, actually relying on the wall. “So, you can fly now. That’s pretty cool. We can fly together!”

Karkat shakes his head. “Not really. I don’t know if it’s another fucking mutantblood thing, but I can hardly get a foot off the ground.”

“Oh.” You say quietly. “If you had to write a rap song in the form of an auto-biography,” You start, “How would you describe yourself?”

Karkat does something that makes you think he rolled his eyes, but you can’t quite tell. You just notice that you can see some kind of maroon smudge underneath him. It pulls at something behind your heart and you wonder if it’s your blood. “I wouldn’t.” Karkat says simply. “If the only way to pass down the Signless’ legacy or whatever was in the form of human slam poetry, then there would be no fucking way it would get passed down. Sorry, but it’s not happening. Fuck the Signless and fuck your stupid human slam poetry.” With every word, he sounded more and more pissed off.

You wish you had even a single line prepared about him. You aren’t sure why it matters so much, or why it’s so hard, or what cause it would even have right now, but you feel like it would be helpful. “What’s your deal? It was a harmless question.”

Karkat put his hands on the back of his neck. His defensive position. “It’s nothing.”

“Just tell me. I assume Other Me is dead, and this might be the last chance you get to say it.” He looks at you with his mouth hanging open and his cheek squished by his arm. His eyebrows furrow.   
  
“No. No, it’s not happening. Fuck that.” 

You’re hit with a strange amount of familiarity and nostalgia. The last time Karkat repeatedly refused to open up was months ago. Like he said, nothing’s constant, but it felt too nice to you to be abnormal to the other timelines. “You’re already fucking dead, dude,” You say, with much more annoyance in your tone than you intend. “You don’t need to cover yourself up with all this anger. Who the hell is it helping?” You ask, exasperated.

“Fuck you! It was you! You’re just so much like him and it fucking hurts!” He bursts out all at once, trying to slam his hands down on the cemented floor, but instead passing through it. You can’t imagine what it would be like, surrounded by endless hallways of gray that you can’t even touch. You assume ‘him’ refers to the other version of you, and your chest clenches. Where is he? Did you want to know? 

You stay quiet.

Thin red tears start down Karkat’s cheeks. You wonder if you can wipe them away. You wonder if he’d let you. “And he was a fucking douche in this timeline.”

You try not to take offense. “How come?”

“Well, you punched me in the face for one.” He deadpans, staring straight through you. 

“Oh. I’m sorry.” 

“It’s not worth anything. You aren’t the same person. I’m sorry for taking it out on you.” He grumbles, sounding very much like he had more to say. You nudge his shoulder out of habit, only for it to pass through you and leave you off feeling slightly worse. 

“It’s okay. I’d probably do the same thing.” You let out a breath, and wonder if Karkat is annoyed by it. “Why’d I punch you?” 

He makes a noise and runs his hands over his face. “Terezi. Bullshit quadrant drama with Terezi.”

You let out a sour little laugh. “We had Terezi quadrant shit too.”

He looks up at you a little hopefully. “How did you deal with it?”

You close your eyes. You can’t do this with them open. It’d be too much. “Took Terezi out of the equation.” Something stops up your blood, and you feel like you can’t breathe. You feel a little nauseous, like you do whenever you mess around with time too much. You wonder if everyone feels like this when they’re in bubbles, or if it’s just time players. You then briefly remember that you just practically confessed to Karkat, and open your eyes.

Except it’s not his face looking back at you. It’s his eyes, and his nose, and his ears, but everything around them is… wrong. He’s never frowned at you like that, or squinted like this before. “What?” There’s an edge of disgust on his voice.

“Well- fuck- not exactly. I still haven’t- we aren’t-” You break up every few words, sounding like a broken wristwatch. Your hands are shaking in your lap and tears are forming in your eyes. “I love you.” You say softly.

He shakes his head. “No you don’t. That’s not me. That’s another Karkat, and this one doesn’t love you back.” He tries to reach a hand out onto your shoulder but it passes through you and you jump back. There’s something welling up in the back of your throat and it feels like you’re drowning in the bottom of that lake again and it’s so hard to breathe and everything’s blurry and you wish it would fucking stop.

“But I… I love you.” You say, like it will fix anything.

“You’re just hurting yourself.” He says sadly.

And just after that tattoos itself on your frontal lobe for forever, you feel your feet being swept out from underneath you and before you can prepare to hit your head, you feel like your spinal cord has been pulled out of your back and you’ve landed on your bed, coughing up your guts. You don’t know where your shades actually are- you might have left them there. But you don’t notice just then because your arms are wrapped around your stomach and tears are streaming down your face and falling into your open-mouthed throat. It fucking hurts to come back while you’re crying, apparently. 

You force yourself to breathe. You hate crying, you always have. It’s probably some kind of survival tactic, but you’re not dealing with that right now. You’re choking air down your throat until the tears stop. You don’t feel any better. 

You’re thinking about how Karkat told you loving him was just going to hurt you.

And considering how you feel right now, you guess he was right. What are you supposed to do? Stop loving him? When you told Karkat, his response was like a slap to the face. It hurt deeper than that, even.  _ and maybe, _ you think,  _ maybe what i need is another one. maybe if karkat is even harsher, itll stick _ . 

You push yourself up off of your bed and go down to his respiteblock. There’s an ugly turning in the back of your head, yelling at you because your first instinct was “Maybe fucking everything up with him will help!”, but you’re not listening at all because you’re flashstepping outside of his door and knocking on it hard.

“What do you want, bulgemuncher?” His voice is muffled from beyond the door.

“Open up.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to tell you something.” 

He sighs loudly enough for you to be able to hear and swings the door open. “What?”

“How do you  _ always _ fall for that-” You smile, because you can’t help it. He goes to close the door again. “No! No, I was joking. I actually do have something to tell you.”

He gestures, rolling his hand in a circle. ‘Get on with it’.

You feel everything come back to you, and feel like you weigh a million pounds. Your hands feel heavy and your chest is still, and there’s nothing between your eyes and his as you say “I love you, and I’m so damn sorry.” Your voice breaks in the middle.

Karkat’s jaw hangs open. You can see each pointy little fang. His face has a rising blush- did you forget that’s what happens when he’s angry? Your blood is pounding in your ears, and your throat feels choked up. If he looks you in the eyes for another moment and doesn’t say anything, you think you’ll cry. You take a shaky breath in and make a weak attempt not to cry like you were earlier. Why wasn’t Karkat saying anything? Wasn’t he angry? The other Karkat hated him, and-

And this Karkat, the Karkat you love, grabbed your cheeks, pulled you in, and kissed you. You weren’t expecting it in the slightest, when you saw his hands move you flinched, honestly, wondering if it’s a universal constant that one of you has to punch the other. And then you remembered the Other Karkat saying that there are no such thing as universal constants. You then decide to stay in the moment instead of thinking about the Karkat that doesn’t like you back. 

  
  


He’s warm, he’s so warm, his lips and his hands on either side of your face. He doesn’t taste like much, but his lips slot perfectly between yours, and you feel like maybe that’s why lips are shaped so weirdly. Rose once said something about sweat, but- right. You’re kissing Karkat, you’re kissing  _ Karkat Vantas _ . You try and soak up the feeling of every centimeter that touches, but he pulls away before you’re done. You feel lightheaded. “Oh.” 

“You’re sorry? You’re fucking sorry?” Karkat laughs, and it sounds bittersweet. His hands return to your face. “You’re so stupid.” 

You laugh as you press your cheek against his hand. “Yeah, I guess so. 


End file.
